Slayers Novel Feats Collection #1 – The Ruby Eye

This blog series isn’t anything special. I’m just collecting some interesting happenings in the Slayers novels that didn’t happen in the anime or mangas. My intention is to catalog the feats for future analysis and perhaps calculation. In effect, you can say that this is a “respect blog.” We’ll start off with the first of the novels, Slayers: The Ruby Eye.

Thanks to a little spell I whipped up to keep my hands free, my mantle, which extends from my collar to my knees, always lies flat, even though it’s lined with leather pouches for holding my loot. (pg. 26)

This spell makes Lina’s encumbrance easier. It’s revealing that the magic seems to be more creative than the manga and anime so far.

I’d like to mention that my own pendant and the short sword I wear on my hip have all been enchanted in just this way. (pg. 31)

Although Lina does enchant in the other mediums, this was not emphasized.

I grasped my fishing hook with my left hand, narrowed my locus, and began chanting a hunger spell of my own devising.

I’m not going to teach you the spell, so don’t even ask. I try not to use it; and if I taught it to you, you’d teach it to someone else and pretty soon there’d be no fish left in the sea! (pg. 35)

Lina proceeded to catch fish and lure the goblins in. They were so hungry they forgot about her and Gourry. Again, the spells seem to be more creative than in the manga or anime.

The short sword I carry on my hip is embedded with an enchanted gemstone I made myself. (pg. 40)

See above. Lina is a skilled enchantress.

Some description of the mechanisms of magic:

Sorcery, I should explain, is divided into three classes: White Magic, Black Magic, and Shamanic Magic. The latter makes use of the four elements (earth, water, fire, air) and the spirit world – it’s the mainstay of any sorcerer. My real specialty though is Black Magic, which isn’t as dastardly as it sounds – I use only the offensive spells, not the curses. (pg. 40)

While implied from elsewhere, the cursing part of Black Magic isn’t really mentioned in other mediums.

The really important thing to remember about trolls, though, is that they’re gifted with rapid regeneration, which means anything less than an instant kill heals within seconds. And that means, of course, that the only way to kill them is with a single blow. (pg. 42)

While seen in the anime, Lina goes over their regeneration in much more detail here. It also tells us the level of regeneration that Lina’s anti-regeneration spell can overcome.

Even though my clothes, as talismans, were charmed, those claws wouldn’t have trouble slicing right into my guts. (pg. 43)

Lina enchanted her clothes too, and they seem to have some level of elevated defense because of it.

Flicking his fingertips, Gourry had managed not only to penetrate the trolls’ hides with those small nuts, but to bury the squirrel feed deep into their flesh. He had propelled those nuts with a level of force that would’ve been more than sufficient to take down normal men. (pg. 45)

While seen in the anime, this is again gone over in more detail here. It tells us what kind of strength Gourry is playing around with.

We know Lina’s fireballs are powerful. Just pointing this out. Wonder how much the volume would be. If it’s any kind of significant amount, this is a lot of energy.

Just then, the trolls halted in their tracks. The old man suddenly seemed to be staring into space. There was no spark of life in his eyes at all. It had to be a puppetry spell.

Puppetry is not a particularly difficult technique. Trolls and other simple-minded creatures fall prey to it easily. Ordinarily, a puppetry spell is used on a single opponent, allowing the sorcerer to use his or her opponent as a tool for a specified amount of time. However, using it on all the trolls and the old guy simultaneously was well beyond the capabilities of any average sorcerer. This particular practitioner had to possess great power. (pg. 78)

Description of mind control in Slayers. The anime hasn’t been too detailed in its feature of “puppetry” spells, so the novel rounds out Slayers hax abilities some more, if I do say so myself.

The rest of the novel more or less proceeds along the same lines of the anime.